How to parse the value of Content-Type from an HTTP Header Response?

Question

My application makes numerous HTTP requests. Without writing a regular expression, how do I parse Content-Type header values? For example:

text/html; charset=UTF-8

For context, here is my code for getting stuff in the internet:

from requests import head

foo = head("http://www.example.com")

The output I am expecting is similar to what the methods do in mimetools. For example:

x = magic("text/html; charset=UTF-8")

Will output:

x.getparam('charset')  # UTF-8
x.getmaintype()  # text
x.getsubtype()  # html

Answer 1

requests doesn't give you an interface to parse the content type, unfortunately, and the standard library on this stuff is a bit of a mess. So I see two options:

Option 1: Go use the python-mimeparse third-party library.

Option 2: To separate the mime type from options like charset, you can use the same technique that requests uses to parse type/encoding internally: use cgi.parse_header.

response = requests.head('http://example.com')
mimetype, options = cgi.parse_header(response.headers['Content-Type'])

The rest should be simple enough to handle with a split:

maintype, subtype = mimetype.split('/')